Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday April 05, 2010 @10:00AM
from the lookit-those-pot-bellies dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Bill Briggs writes on MSNBC that the two tech titans are rumbling into middle age as Microsoft marked its 35th birthday on Sunday and Apple turned 34 late last week. But while Microsoft, to some, appears a tad flabby in the middle — a Chrysler Town & Country driver with a 9 pm bedtime — Apple, in some eyes, looks sleeker and younger — a hipster in a ragtop Beemer packed with chic friends sporting mobile toys. 'The difference between the two companies is that Apple has been fearless about transformational change while Microsoft has been reluctant to leave its past behind,' says Casey Ayers, president of MegatonApps. 'Microsoft has always been loath to change and risk alienating some of its customers, but its inability to leave the past behind has left their product line bloated and dysfunctional.' On current accounting ledgers, Microsoft overshadows Apple: Microsoft's market cap is $255.75 billion; Apple's is $213.98 billion. But Apple is getting awfully big — awfully fast — in Microsoft's rearview mirror. Consider that a decade ago Microsoft's market cap was almost $590 billion and Apple's was about $16 billion. So while Apple cheered its opening weekend of iPad sales, what wish should Microsoft have made when it blew out its birthday candles Sunday? 'More than anything, Microsoft's birthday wish should be for fearless leadership,' says Ayers. 'Without someone at the top who feels an urgency to constantly innovate in meaningful ways, Microsoft will shrink and become less relevant with each birthday to come.'"

Microsoft has always been loath to change and risk alienating some of its customers

Uh, maybe if you're only looking at Windows and/or Office products. They also seem to do greatly, so why fix something that isn't broken?

But with some of their other divisions I wish they didn't change. Anyone else remember such from Microsoft Games as Flight Simulator, Age of Empires series, Halo, Train Simulator, MechWarrior, Links, Midtown Madness, Motocross Madness.. Now that they changed they're not publishing or developing those kind of games anymore. In fact no one is. Microsoft Games is just for Xbox 360 anymore.

"Without someone at the top who feels an urgency to constantly innovate in meaningful ways, Microsoft will shrink and become less relevant with each birthday to come."

Just yesterday slashdotters laughted how Microsoft is burning money on their online division like Bing and other properties, how it's completely useless. Which one it is now, to think long term or not to think?

And Motocross Madness went way downhill. Midtown Madness and Mech Warrior were pretty good fun. There are alternatives to all those games available today though I think. I'm not so sure about really good alternatives to Flight Sim and Train Sim as it's not really in my area of interest, but there must be some..

Well having owned both MS products and Apple products, I prefer the MS model of long-term support (so too do businesses apparently).

"The difference between the two companies is that Apple has been fearless about transformational change while Microsoft has been reluctant to leave its past behind," says Casey Ayers, president of MegatonApps.

That sounds really negative against Microsoft doesn't it?

But another way to look at this quote is that Apple abandons machines too fast, leaving users with computer than refuse to run the latest software. EXAMPLE: I used to have a Mac but since it could not be upgraded higher than 10.3 (2003), it was unable to run the latest browsers. They wouldn't even install.

Look at 10.5 which forbids an install on machines below 800 megahertz. Apple should not have forbade people with 700 or 600 MHz machines from upgrading if they so desired. Microsoft doesn't. If you want to run Win7 on a slow machine, you can - no restriction.

Remember that this very thing has been instrumental in completely ruining one of their Windows versions. Instead of giving hard limits as to where Vista can reasonably run and where it can't they gave two sets of system specs: One where the OS actually works and one where it can merely boot up. The latter one was called "Vista Capable" and lead to a lot of bad PR.

Had Microsoft declared from the start that Vista requires a 1 GHz CPU, 1 GiB or RAM and a 128 MiB GPU in order to perform adequately people would have complained about the high requirements but there wouldn't have been a media spectacle about how Vista doesn't work on machines following Microsoft's specs.

Apple doesn't do "kinda sorta works if you don't run any demanding programs", they only do "works" and "doesn't work". While this does lock people out of upgrades, it also protects Apple from exactly the kind of PR fiasco Microsoft had.

I believe the newest browser you can put on Windows 98 is IE5 or IE6. I went through that practice in a virtual machine. IE7 supports only XP and above.

Vendors on the MS side tend to support their 3rd party products longer. Browsers like Firefox, Opera, etc are 3rd party applications, not MS supported apps. You would be hard pressed to find any vendor that sent out software with Windows 98 software support listed in it's specs. Firefox no longer supports Windows 98 either.

Jaguar 10.2 was released 8 years ago. It is not unreasonable that it is no longer supported. They have replaced the processor architecture since then, switching from PPC to Intel. The same goes for 10.3, which was supported under PPC. At some point, it makes sense to drop support for a hardware platform that is no longer actively being produced.

Considering Windows 98 doesn't even make the chart, would you spend time supporting it? What about Windows 2000? It has.6% of the population, which is a fraction of even Linux numbers.

Your argument sounds good on the surface, except for the fact that I don't know a single person who still uses 98, ME, or 2000 for that matter. Why would a company waste dollars supporting an infinitesimal population of hardware when an upgrade is only a few hundred dollars. Add to that, the popularity of laptop computers, which are prohibitively expensive to service. It's usually cheaper to replace them if you have any sort of failure outside of the 'disposable' components like HD's, Memory Sims, or optical drives.

Every business I have worked for in the last 15 years upgrades their PC hardware every 2-4 years. I'm betting most home users do the same but at twice those intervals (4-8 years), either due to desire, or component failure.

The business model would certainly work well for businesses, and also works well for home users. Mac users tend to have more disposable income. It certainly isn't hurting the Apple bottom line, and you get a leaner OS in the bargain.

In the end, the 3rd party vendor support is far more important than the OS itself. The oddest thing is that Apple is far more popular with the home user crowd even though the support model would seem to be more in line with business practices in regards to sunsetting old hardware. I can only assume the Mac users have more disposable income is a factor. Although I'm sure there are still PPC's out there still ticking along, the bulk have probably long since upgraded to an Intel Mac.

I've tried to put IE7 on Windows 98. It was not possible to install it. Considering even XP needs Service Pack 2 to install IE7, I think your not being quite honest. Mozilla is irrelevant as it isn't an MS product. Ditto for Opera. If the vendor chooses to support a specific version of an OS then there is or isn't much MS could do about it either way. That said, even Mozilla has dropped support for Windows 98.

Apple isn't forcing you to run out and do anything. Your old version of Safari isn't going to stop

and if what you mentioned is true about them only running on MS XBox then it was also not profit driving which caused Microsoft to purchase these products and then drop all support but MS XBox. It would look like more platform protectionism to me.

Just yesterday slashdotters laughted how Microsoft is burning money on their online division like Bing and other properties, how it's completely useless. Which one it is now, to think long term or not to think?

They're burning money, yes. But not on anything that gives people surprises. If they're truly doing something massively innovative and useful at the same time, people should be surprised. In terms of investment, it's always possible to increase your risk a whole lot, but it's much more difficult to increase your profit.

What would be "massively innovative and useful"? I think Courier [engadget.com] looks innovative and way better than iPad and other tablets. Live and the community on Xbox 360 is something not on other devices and the in-game interface quite innovative. But I wouldn't say it's massively innovative, in fact nothing is. Are Google or Apple in some way massively innovative? No, neither one of them are. Apple just takes an open source project and polishes the user experience and interface. There was existing search engines b

Microsoft has always been loath to change and risk alienating some of its customers

Uh, maybe if you're only looking at Windows and/or Office products. They also seem to do greatly, so why fix something that isn't broken?

One thing that alienates me is that they are NOT loathe to change. They change many products so much that the training curve one a product you've already mastered is as great as if you'd bought a competetitor's product. IE, for example, has had its "internet options" in every single one of i

I don't think it's changed too much. I recently found a Windows 3.1 laptop, and was surprised how similar MS Word's menu and organization was to my current 2003 version. I was able to pick-up and use the old Word with no learning curve whatsoever.

Age of Empires series - developed by Ensemble Studios and which withered after MS's acquisition,

Halo - developed by Bungie, another company that made awesome products until MS bought them.

Train Simulator - developed by Kuju Entertainment and licensed to MS.

MechWarrior - developed by Dynamix, is this owned by MS now?

Links - developed by Access Software, again bought by MS afterwards.

Midtown Madness - Developed by Angel studios, part of Rockstar, later bought by Take2. I don't think this is owned by MS though.

Motocross Madness - developed by THQ, part of Rainbow, not MS.

You've put together a lovely homage to MS's buying out and ruining of good game companies since every good game you came up with was developed by a company that MS bought out after they made something good, or which you thought was made by MS but was actually not. More than half the companies no longer exist having been mothballed by MS.

You forgot Rare aka Rareware. They made some awesome games back in the N64 days, that really pushed the console to its limits (like Banjo Kazooie 2). Then Microsoft bought them. What has Rare done since then? Nothing of note.

<quote>Just yesterday slashdotters laughted how Microsoft is burning money on their online division like Bing and other properties, how it's completely useless. Which one it is now, to think long term or not to think?</quote><p>I believe there are two different threads there. For one, Microsoft spends billions annually year after year on products and projects which have failed to make them profits. Things like MSN, MS Live Search-aka BING, XBox, Windows CE and many more. No other business

because if you don't "fix" what's "not broken", the competion will steamroll you with newer, fancier models and you'll end up broken.

using car analogies, there's nothing "broken" in this year's models from every manufacturer, but if they don't "fix" them, next year they'll be deep in the red, watching the competition take all the market.

sales are driven by innovation. microsoft only innovation was bringing a GUI that you could slap in a generic, gray box, low cost PC. but this is old news. people want other

Microsoft bought most of those games, and as you've pointed out those games have generally gone downhill since MS bought them...Windows/Office only sell because of inertia, they are far from being best in class and wouldn't be able to stand on their own in a freely competitive market.MS is wasting lots of money trying to out-do google, but they are pretty much following the same strategy they always have - release inferior products, and leverage existing market share in other areas to promote the inferior p

I used to dream about this kind of thing as a teenager.. with both Macs and Amigas. Nice in a nostalgic kind of way that one of them has made it. Shame I've lost interest now because of their years of DRM in music and now a differently form of DRM on all their gadgets. If they open things up more then I will probably become interested again though.

OSX isn't bad, but Ubuntu is generally more configurable, and just easier to set up and maintain via the repositories. I love being able to install Perl modules w

It's not a matter of if Apple will pass Microsoft now, but when. Google's also making a run at it, but they've got a lot further to go.

The question is, when Apple passes Microsoft, who will become the new cool company? Remember back when Microsoft was young and hip? Now everyone hates them (okay not everyone, but it is cool to rip on them now and again). If Apple does overtake Microsoft, it seems likely the same thing will happen to them.

And, if Apple does take over the market, how hard are they going to be hit by antitrust suits? If Microsoft isn't allowed to bundle IE with Windows (in Europe) I feel like someone might take issue with

It's not a matter of if Apple will pass Microsoft now, but when. Google's also making a run at it, but they've got a lot further to go.

Apple's market cap is driven by the same hip image as their hardware. Now, I like Apple products. They are executing extremely well, and delivering high quality, market leading products in their niches. But this is already part of their stock price, and then some. Apple has a 50% higher P/E than Microsoft, and that is a bit much.

I'm allowed to disagree on/. I hope. Bias that is trying to sway people by leaving out all the facts is not helpful.

Apple is the THE most monopolistic company involved in electronics today. At one time, the fanboys used to point fingers at MS at being the big monopoly. Now Apple controls all software, hardware, distribution for everything the touch. Sure they make good products, but they were also positioned in such a way that they could screw over their base and make huge OS changes over the past 30 years and leave all previous software behind. You upgrade to new OS, you buy all new software too. Apple could do that with only a handful of buyers. MS on the other hand had millions of corporate and individual users that couldn't afford to purchase completely new versions of all of their software they bought.

Did MS lack the ability to change and advance fast, OR did market mandate that they move slow? I think a reasonable argument could be made for the latter. I know that through each new version of OS that MS produced, I was able to keep the thousands of dollars of software I had invested in. Now with Win 7 working wonderfully, I would expect to see more Apple attacks so they don't lose ground against MS.

It is a hardware company vs. a software company.
Maybe 20 years ago they competed but that is no longer the case.

Nothing bias against either side but Apple's main focus is gadgets while Microsoft's main focus is software. Yes, Apple makes software and yes Microsoft makes hardware but neither are their main focuses.

It's a valid comparison because they make a ton of competing products. BOTH make both hardware and software. Mac OS X vs Windows. iTunes vs Xbox360/Zune MarketPlace. iPhoneOS vs Windows Mobile. iPod vs Zune. Safari vs IE. Only someone wanting to argue pointless semantics can claim that the two aren't competing. You can't define boxes to try and throw the two into and then claim them separate.

Plus the only real Video editing setup you can buy is on OSX only. Avid has gone to crap over the past 8 years so Final Cut is the only real choice anymore.... No the toys from adobe and sony are not real video editing,those are toys used by wedding videographers, guys who wish they could get a real gig.

Yes, but the professional video editors are not exactly a large market. Besides, you could replace OSX with Windows and Final Cut with Office, and it would hold true, except that Office is actually used by

More than anything, Microsoft's birthday wish should be for fearless leadership," says Ayers. "Without someone at the top who feels an urgency to constantly innovate in meaningful ways, Microsoft will shrink and become less relevant with each birthday to come

There's another component you need if you want to use fearless leadership and disruptive innovation to be the bedrock of your success: you need to also be right. Apple's taken some big product risks. None of them were exactly bet-the-company-big risks, but pretty risky. The fact that we're still talking about Apple is that they've taken chances and been right. There are plenty of companies out there that had a scary-cool product or technology, something transformational, but missed something along the way: misjudged the market, misjudged their capital needs, rushed a buggy product to market, etc. Don't hear much from those companies anymore.

While there's something to be said for bluffing in poker and going all in, it's much better to go all in when you've got the cards. You can bluff and buy the pot only so many times before someone calls you on it and you're out of the game.

Both Microsoft and Apple are big enough that they can make large bets on new technology and ideas and have them fail. You are right that other companies flame out when they make a large bet and it doesn't work out, but that doesn't apply here.

If the iPad were a complete flop and nobody bought it, that wouldn't kill apple. It wouldn't even cripple them. It would represent a large waste of time and capitol, but the company would go on doing what it does. that is the advantage of being a big company.

Both Microsoft and Apple are big enough that they can make large bets on new technology and ideas and have them fail. You are right that other companies flame out when they make a large bet and it doesn't work out, but that doesn't apply here.
If the iPad were a complete flop and nobody bought it, that wouldn't kill apple. It wouldn't even cripple them. It would represent a large waste of time and capitol, but the company would go on doing what it does. that is the advantage of being a big company.

Hmm, I'm going to have to disagree in general. While you're right about the iPad, that is not reflective of past Apple's gambles. Buying Next and putting Jobs back in charge, for example, could have killed Apple. Betting big on all in one machines and laptops , when those were both niche markets could have killed the company. Licensing OS 9 to other hardware makers nearly did kill them, and buying out and abandoning that strategy could have done the same if it had not worked (not that they had anything to l

None of them were exactly bet-the-company-big risks, but pretty risky.

While I agree with your post almost entirely, I think that the introduction of the original Bondi Blue iMac was indeed a bet-the-company-big risk. The company was at a very low ebb with relatively little capital and a shrinking market share at that time. Many people were predicting it's imminent demise. If the iMac gambit had failed, there would be no Apple, Inc. now.

Microsoft has been consistently successful - in and of itself, that makes it hard to "leave the past behind". Over the same period, Apple made a slew of really bad decisions which brought the company pretty much into irrelevance by the mid-1990s. For Apple, leaving the past behind was an asset - Apple basically had to make itself over just to survive. That's served Apple well this decade, but let's not forget where they were (compared to Microsoft) previously.

Microsoft has been consistently successful - in and of itself, that makes it hard to "leave the past behind".

More to the point, its customers won't let it. How many times has consumer backlash basically forced Microsoft to continue support for older products, backwards compatibility for documents going back decades, and "classic" views within their newer products?

Actually, market cap should reflect all of those things, if the market is doing its job. Now maybe you think you know better than the market. In which case you are either an arrogant fool, or very very rich since you can be a Warren Buffet and outthink the market. The question is, which one are you?

And if the past couple years of financial unrest has taught us anything, the market and its analysts aren't nearly as knowledgeable as we are led to believe. A great example would be the people that followed Jim Cramer on Mad Money, the best option was doing the exact opposite of what he said. It is a mixture of corporations playing with numbers to look better than they are, and the herd mentality of investors.

Yes, because the market worked perfectly in Phoenix where a 1500 sq.ft. house sold for $500,000 three years ago and today can't be given away. It sure worked for Lehman Brothers, WaMu, and all the other banks that had stellar stock prices until *after* news broke that they were actually worthless and the shareholders needed to head for the fire exits or their 'investment' would quickly evaporate into a stack of pennies. Yep, good old market, always smarter than the individuals.

If the market really took all of that into account, and was working on absolutely real, honest and predictable numbers, I would agree with you. Instead, it operates on a significant amount of hype, lies and half-truths; otherwise you wouldn't have insane boom-bust cycles as we've seen recently, both for the market as a whole and for individual companies. If Ford was worth $15 a share at the beginning of 2005, and it's worth $14 a share now, was it really only worth $1.40 on November 21, 2008? Or was that

That for the longest time, Apple was considered a joke and that the 90's where pretty much a dark age for them. It wasn't really until the sleek imac came out that their fortunes turned around and everything since then has been really a one trick pony (as in the imac, the iphone and the ipad share very similar visual design).

MS have had their dark age too, but listening to the poster you'd think that Apple were always the hip kid on the block. Personally I think next year is the return of MS (and I've bee

IMHO Microsoft's dominance has reached its peak, 2010 will mark the beginning of the end of the firm grip that they had over the OS market. Windows is so bloated from carrying all the compatibility crap, regarding both software and hardware, while OS X only needs to carry what is needed, given that they only need to support their own hardware. For example, Snow Leopard has *lost* size compared to Leopard because they were shifting out PPC support. Microsoft will always have to support thousands of different

. Due to their business strategy to lock customers into their products, i.e. not complying to standards, they don't need to innovate, they just have to make sure that the locks are still firm. A good indication of the beginning of the end is that it is starting to get lucrative for companies to break out of the Microsoft prison. Apple is doing the right thing, they keep their products simple, they don't try to appeal to every human crawling the face of the earth, and they emphasize on products that actually *work*.

Hold the fuck on. Are you really suggestion that Apple is less restrictive than Microsoft? Seriously?

Oh yeah, I forgot... the App Store and iTunes are the pinnacles of consumer empowerment. I mean, it doesn't get much better than having to hack your device so you can use non-Apple approved programs, or having your music player wipe itself completely because you hooked it up to a different computer.

Yup. Apple really knows how to let people use their purchases freely.::golf clap::

The main reason Apple is a little more spry is that it had to change or go bankrupt. It had to innovate and compete. Microsoft is still riding its dominate position (monopoly) on the desktop and really hasn't learned any new tricks. As the desktop moves to the palm top I guess we'll see if M$ can adapt its strategy to the mobile market very effectively. Apple gets to do what Apple does well - supply and OS/hardware combo that has a well thought out user interface.

You can go back 15 years and see people claiming the same thing about Windows 95 -- "the end of Microsoft." Or four years and read about iPod versus Zune -- "the end of Microsoft." Or Google versus Bing more recently. Why exactly do you think it will be different this time around?

Due to their business strategy to lock customers into their products, i.e. not complying to standards

Are you sure you're not talking about Apple here? Doesn't iTunes make users jump through hoops to get MP3s that will play an

Apple has basically avoided the corporate market, which is where most of Microsoft's money is made, however much ground they are gaining in the home market. Toes are being stepped on, to be sure, but I just don't see Microsoft and Apple as being on a collision course for the most part. Given the conservative nature of the corporate market, what's much more likely is that Apple will end up as the dominant home player, at least for a while, and Microsoft will follow IBM into being solely a corporate player.

The danger to Apple is that very large enterprises always ossify, and the market they are coming to dominate in the short term -- which is basically home entertainment electronics -- is vastly more competitive and unstable than the PC market has ever been (or likely ever will be). When much of your appeal is driven by current fashion trends, you're vulnerable in a way that a vendor of business software seldom faces.

Note that I'm not saying Apple is doomed or any similar nonsense. Apple is doing very well and probably will continue to do so for some time, and Microsoft will probably continue its slow decline. What I'm saying is that Microsoft and Apple are less and less in competition with each other. Apple will probably spend a lot more time in the future competing with companies like Sony and JVC and LG than it does with Microsoft, and they'll most likely do very well, at least as long as Jobs is at the helm. After Jobs, I'm rather less sanguine about Apple's future because people like Jobs (or, for that matter, Gates) tend not to groom their successors very well.

I think Apple is back dooring the corporate market via the iPhone. I've run into a couple of companies lately that are all Microsoft, all the time on the desktop but have made the iPhone as their corporate standard.

And in some cases, Macs are still hanging in there in marketing/publishing roles within businesses even though the "need" for a Mac in that role has long passed (IMHO).

I'd agree with this. The company I'm working for has started to support the iPhone (I can't wait to replace my stupid Blackberry!), and since then, the halo effect has moved outwards, and they are supporting the use of MacBooks. My Dell laptop is up for replacement later this year; I'm hoping to get a MacBook pro...

Toes are being stepped on, to be sure, but I just don't see Microsoft and Apple as being on a collision course for the most part. Given the conservative nature of the corporate market, what's much more likely is that Apple will end up as the dominant home player, at least for a while, and Microsoft will follow IBM into being solely a corporate player.

I see it a little differently. Apple is not targeting the corporate market, but others are and Apple is enabling those others to be successful. MS makes a lot of money, but their business strategy is based upon locking people in and being dominant. If they lose the lock-in or the dominance, they will lose ground very, very quickly to other players, including Apple unless MS can adapt and completely turn around their own ossified corporate culture.

It isn't just that large enterprises always ossify(though that is usually true), it's that Apple's style absolutely relies on taste, which is a hard commodity to keep around(particularly after Jobs eventually snuffs it).

Apple has, for a company of its size, a tiny product line. Very few choices, not a whole lot of backward compatibility(more than the Telcomm classic of "want a new OS revision? Buy a new phone and a new 2 year contract"; but way less than corporate-world Microsoft stuff). As long as the f

You make an interesting point, but beyond the other response to yours about the iPhone, I'm interested in seeing how the iPad plays into some markets. I wouldn't be surprised to see iPads showing up in a bunch of markets beyond "home". I'm thinking:
- Education, selling them at a steep discount pre-populated with textbooks to universities and even high schools.
- Medical. So long, clipboards!
- Sales and other personal-interaction-heavy industries where someone might want to be able to do presentations o

Microsoft's appetite for aquisitions is part of its downfall. They are constantly distracted by taking over other companies, some of them with very little to do with their core competancy. Often these aquisitions are simply lost money because they take them over and ruin a perfectly good business. Contrast Apple who rarely do aquisitions, and when they do they've got a really really good reason for it, related to a strategic vision.

If Apple suddenly disappeared, people could easily get equivalent products from other manufacturers, since other companies sell equivalent phones, MP3 players and computers. While they don't have the Apple brand and may not be as polished in some aspects, they do essentially the same things.

On the other hand, the reason Microsoft has so much overhead is that they provide infinite backwards compatibility for their corporate clients. People love bashing Microsoft, but they forget that MS must provide binary compatibility for their clients who unconditionally have to run really old apps, because their businesses depend on it. Windows must run on a huge variety of hardware combinations, and must be supported over 10+ year lifespans. For example, Windows XP licenses were sold from 2002 to early 2009, and Microsoft will support this platform for many years into the future.

Apple products and Linux distributions often break compatibility between revisions, for legitimate technical reasons. But Microsoft can't do that even when they want to, because their hundreds of thousands of corporate clients can't be expected to update all their software accordingly. The thousands of hardware manufacturers won't all update their drivers either. Regardless, Microsoft tried doing that and Vista happened. It took several years for manufacturers and Microsoft itself to catch up, and we got Windows 7, which works quite well.

So if Microsoft is reluctant to leave the past, it's because it has contractual obligations to support its clients. Apple makes no such commitments and sells primarily to end users. Thus, it can afford to make more aggressive changes.

Apple is, I think, selling a lifestyle within a closed ecosphere. You can now get pretty much all your electronic gadgets through Apple, from the smartphone, to the laptop, to the PC, to the iPad, iTouch, iPod.

If you think about their lineup I think all they are missing is a TV device. If they had that then they could pretty much offer all the form factors that people use LCD screens for. So i guess the question is how far off the iTV is. Give the iTV built in wi-fi and the whole home could be set up

anybody remember IBM? Remember how anybody predicted IBM would die, go bancrupt or beocme irrelevant? Good.
Big companies have the tendency to sometimes have weak phases and then - if they realize what is going on - strong phases.

"The difference between the two companies is that Apple has been fearless about transformational change while Microsoft has been reluctant to leave its past behind"

Lies! You (mercifully?) forget Microsoft Bob. Also, the first time I ever heard of tablet computers is when I heard Bill Gates hyping it as the next revolutionary step forward for computers at least five years ago. The issue is not so much Microsoft's boldness as its incompetency (though the fact that the media doesn't treat Gate's words as inspired prophesy like it does Jobs's probably has something to do with it, too).

... while Microsoft, to some, appears a tad flabby in the middle — a Chrysler Town & Country driver with a 9 pm bedtime...

Yeah, you hipsters sneer at a 9 pm bedtime. But while you punks are rolling into work at nine-ish and don't really get going until around 10 or so.. I've gotten in a full day's work and I'm out the door by 4 pm to enjoy a beautiful summer spring day.

Please allow me to continue pretending that Hipsters and Punks are separate and incompatible social groups.

Anyway, the Young People have been preferring to stay up late for far longer than the hipster trend (even longer than the original hipsters in the 1950s (you have my permission to call Beatniks compatible with Punks if you like), probably ever since God invented light bulbs and leisure time).

And Apple is ripping benefits for first capitalizing on that. Non-technical users want a well built appliance with a single point of support that runs a few dozen applications. This may not be the product that big corporation want, as central administration and customization is limited. This is not what geeks want, as much of both hardware and software is locked up and proprietary. But for many users its worth sacrificing one kind of freedom (ability to run pr0n games or web servers on their phone) for anot

When i partially read the title tought that was about Microsoft and Apple moving us to the Middle Age, but patents and their economic policies are from a bit later than those dates. The least i could imagine that was about those companies getting old.

Before you offer him that steak, you better check to see what his partial digestive tract and donor liver can tolerate.... Guy's been through a lot lately, give him a break. I don't care how powerful he is or how much money he has, cancer's a bitch and I don't wish it on anyone.

Please mod the parent up. I don't care about Apple products as I think they're not for me, much in the same way a Mustang isn't for me (to continue the car analogy, I'm a Mini Cooper/Lotus Elise fan myself). But for every sane person I run into who owns a MacBook Pro I manage to run into at least two Apple Zealots who make me LOATHE Apple products.

I've met some Linux/FSS zealots before, but generally they're hard for me to find, even at LUG meetings and so forth. Just my experience, naturally, and the

Something that is vital to Apple overtaking Microsoft is a shift in attitude of the "zealous Apple consumer". Most folks that use Apple products are fine, but holy jeebus do Apple zealots piss me off. We get it, your brand of choice is shiny and pretty. Shut up about it.

Again, I know this only applies to a small portion of the Apple userbase, but that small portion is unbelievably annoying.

The usual "this is only my opinion" disclaimer applies.

MSFT has its fanboys. Long Zheng, Paul Thurrott and those neowin site. Not to mention those stupid "Windows 7 was my idea" adverts.

Microsoft fanboys don't pretend they are better than you...they pretend the products they use are better than the products you use. I'm fine with that. I've been a gamer and internet lurker for a very long time, I'm used to that sort of thinking. While I personally think it's stupid to lock yourself into only one option (i.e. I owned both an SNES AND a Genesis), I understand why some people have that kind of mentality.

Apple fanboys, however, go beyond mere brand loyalty. Apple fanboys insinuate that they are a better person than I am simply because they use Apple products and I don't. That is something I have absolutely zero patience for.

Where are these hated Apple zealots you constantly complain about? As usual, the article comments are a stream of barely-thought-out vitriol, from people who seemingly just need something and someone to hate. And, as usual, the mythical Apple fanboy is nowhere to be seen.

One of them sits just down the hall from me. The man submits a request literally every month to have his corporate-provided ThinkPad replaced with a Macbook because he "can't get any work done on this piece of crap."

Love or hate Apple its more than mere marketing hype. Instead of being the end all and be all for everyone, they focus on very specific groups and very specific features that suit the small chosen area well. Of course for us that want more from our hardware we are screaming for more but for that catered group its often a perfect fit.

Apple is making the transition from a computer company to an appliance company. Expect more and more companies to starting do this as the industry starts moving

>>>they focus on very specific groups and very specific features that suit the small chosen area well

Translation: I like to buy luxury products (like Lexuses and Acuras and Apples) even though I know they are not really any different than their cheaper Toyota/Honda/Windows counterparts.

And that's fine. Just don't expect those of us who prefer a Camry or Civic or Win7 machine to go gah-gah over the more expensive products. We're happy with what we got, and we're not stupid for choosing what we ch

Ok, show me a video editing suite with 3/4 the ease and power as final cut pro suite for windows and I'll switch.

I've tried EVERYTHING under windows, and none of it can hold a candle to the workflow and speed of quality production as the FCP suite. Even AVID. I'd utterly kill for something that was 1/2 as effective as FCP for linux. but sadly nothing exists except toys that crash all the time or are for making really low quality home movies.

I'm not a fanboi, I am cringing hard at the though of having to spend $3500.00 on a new PC to be able to buy the current update to FCP. My Quad core G5 still works great, but I see the need to upgrade in the next year in order to maintain a speedy render time and workflow. and I cant build a hackintosh that will run stable as a rock to save my life....

Again, someone who doesn't understand that his priorities are not the ones of the mainstream consumer electronics user. "Hitting the right notes with the right people" is the only thing that matters, especially when the "right people" are a customer base that just about anyone would give their right arm for. Nobody except the geeks out there care about the things you complain about. The Apple systems work, you can find an application for almost anything you want to do, and the price point is not excessive for the perceived value.

Mainstream engineers with attitudes like yours have had sixty years of computing history (and forty-some odd years since the advent of the personal computer - note, I count this time since Kay's work on Dynapad and the Alto at Xerox PARC) to deliver a good user experience. They have failed. You hype systems (like Windows and Linux) which, although open, force users into the role of system administrator all too often and deliver inconsistent user experiences.

Apple, on the other hand, has succeeded. That they did so by walling the garden makes little difference to their customers. Understand that and you will understand the future. Disregard it and you'll be consigned to the dust heap of history. If you want to fight their closedness, you first have to make your open systems appealing and easy to use. Get a clue, people.

Not really. Small companies and academic research departments come up with good ideas, Apple implements them well, and Microsoft implements them badly. Somewhat depressingly, quite a few of these good ideas come from MS Research, yet good implementations of them never seem to make it into shipping MS products.

Umm, generally middle age refers to a period of a person's life, not a point in time. The US census bureau considers middle age to be 35-54, so claiming a company is becoming "middle aged" when it is 35 is not really all that unusual or outside of the normal use of the phrase.

MS has primarily been a software company as far as PCs go. Users wind up buying primarily a hardware system, that typically has MS on it.

Apple does not make hardware, it merely creates hardware specifications that are manufactured in Chinese factories just like they are for PCs. The only real difference between OS X and Windows is that OS X is designed to work only on a much more limited range of hardware than does Windows.

MS winds up being limited by the innovation of its "partners". Apple has profited fro